Feminist Theory and Practice--Flores
As Ch. 6 of CTP notes, feminist criticism offers diverse, heterogeneous perspectives
on such important but problematic issues as the definition and stability
of a gendered identity and how to characterize, recognize, and critique
the gender-based struggle for power over definition and meanings
(CTP 229). As Germaine Greer argued in the early 1970s, feminine stereotypes
are acts of--or effects of--commodification within a system of patriarchal capitalism
that deals in the display and exchange of women. Should feminist
critics today continue to explore such exchanges of representations of women
in literary texts? In the mid 1980s, Hélène Cixous argued that
the feminine is largely absent from the patriarchal order of language,
appearing only as negative, subordinated terms in a series of figurative, binary
oppositions that produce and are produced by phallogocentrism (CTP 245). Rather
than dwelling upon the otherness of feminine discourse, Luce Irigaray
insists on the subversive, parodic, multivalent potential of écriture
féminine. How do such assertions and observations affect your sense of
whats at stake in coming to terms with the genders of discourse? If we
acknowledge the instability of subjectivity--with Julia Kristeva and other anti-essentialists--what
happens to efforts to make a difference--a collective, political difference--in
the name of women or feminism? Do the difficulties of
defining lesbian writing (CTP 250-53) also inhabit feminist criticism
in general? Criticism in general? What relations do gender studies
or mens studies bear to women studies? Myra Jehlen
states that speaking of gender does not mean speaking only of women. As
a critical term gender invokes women only insofar as in its absence
they are essentially invisible. And it brings them up not only for their own
interest but to signal the sexed nature of men as well, and beyond that the
way the sexed nature of both women and men is not natural but cultural. In this
sense, gender may be opposed to sex as culture is to nature so that its realtion
to sexual nature is unknown and probably unknowable: how, after all, do we speak
of human beings outside of culture? (Critical Terms for Literary Study
265). After discussing the performative nature of gender, Jehlen
declares provocatively: It is logically impossible to interrogate gender--to
transform it from axiom to object of scrutiny and critical term--without also
interrogating race and class (272). Can you explain, emulate, illustrate
what Jehlen means?
Klages on Judith Butler's Gender Trouble